Personalized recommender systems play a crucial role in direct marketing, particularly in financial services, where delivering relevant content can enhance customer engagement and promote informed decision-making. This study explores interpretable knowledge graph (KG)-based recommender systems by proposing two distinct approaches for personalized article recommendations within a multinational financial services firm. The first approach leverages Reinforcement Learning (RL) to traverse a KG constructed from both structured (tabular) and unstructured (textual) data, enabling interpretability through Path Directed Reasoning (PDR). The second approach employs the XGBoost algorithm, with post-hoc explainability techniques such as SHAP and ELI5 to enhance transparency. By integrating machine learning with automatically generated KGs, our methods not only improve recommendation accuracy but also provide interpretable insights, facilitating more informed decision-making in customer relationship management.

In today’s world, the advancement and spread of the Internet and digitalization have resulted in most information being openly accessible. This holds true for financial services as well. Investors make data driven decisions by analysing publicly available information like annual reports of listed companies, details regarding asset allocation of mutual funds, etc. Many a time these financial documents contain unknown financial terms. In such cases, it becomes important to look at their definitions. However, not all definitions are equally readable. Readability largely depends on the structure, complexity and constituent terms that make up a definition. This brings in the need for automatically evaluating the readability of definitions of financial terms. This paper presents a dataset, FinRAD consisting of financial terms, their definitions and embeddings. In addition to standard readability scores (like “Flesch Reading Index (FRI)”, “Automated Readability Index (ARI)”, “SMOG Index Score (SIS)”,“Dale-Chall formula (DCF)”, etc.), it also contains the readability scores (AR) assigned based on sources from which the terms have been collected. We manually inspect a sample from it to ensure the quality of the assignment. Subsequently, we prove that the rule-based standard readability scores (like “Flesch Reading Index (FRI)”, “Automated Readability Index (ARI)”, “SMOG Index Score (SIS)”,“Dale-Chall formula (DCF)”, etc.) do not correlate well with the manually assigned binary readability scores of definitions of financial terms. Finally, we present a few neural baselines using transformer based architecture to automatically classify these definitions as readable or not. Pre-trained FinBERT model fine-tuned on FinRAD corpus performs the best (AU-ROC = 0.9927, F1 = 0.9610). This corpus can be downloaded from https://github.com/sohomghosh/FinRAD_Financial_Readability_Assessment_Dataset.

Simplified definitions of complex terms help learners to understand any content better. Comprehending readability is critical for the simplification of these contents. In most cases, the standard formula based readability measures do not hold good for measuring the complexity of definitions of financial terms. Furthermore, some of them works only for corpora of longer length which have at least 30 sentences. In this paper, we present a tool for evaluating readability of definitions of financial terms. It consists of a Light GBM based classification layer over sentence embeddings (Reimers et al., 2019) of FinBERT (Araci, 2019). It is trained on glossaries of several financial textbooks and definitions of various financial terms which are available on the web. The extensive evaluation shows that it outperforms the standard benchmarks by achieving a AU-ROC score of 0.993 on the validation set.